However, the downtimes were not the only big issue with the switch: in the process Sampo also switched from a reputedly very functional HTML-based web banking interface into a Java Applet that is doing some quite dubious snooping on user's computer. And of course they didn't do much cross-browser testing. Here is what I see with Firefox 3 beta:

I remember when our former accounting software SaaS vendor Procountor did a switch from HTML to Java Applet. Suddenly a very fast and easy UI was changed to slow and unusable semi-desktop-ish application. Needless to say, my company dumped them immediately. Java Applets may have had advantages in 90s, but in the Age of Ajax they are mostly obsolete.

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More than 10% of all the websites in the world are run by Drupal, WordPress and Joomla — just these three. And all three are open source CMSs, so if you just count those three CMSs, you would lose 10% of the websites.

When standards-conscious designers validate their XHTML and CSS templates, everything is nicely compliant up until the point where they start tying in the necessary automated systems like ad software, CMSes, or e-commerce apps. The tools then get in the way and code is needed to fix validation, but a lot of designers dont code.

Decoupled Content Management

Decoupled Content Management is a movement to bring clean separation of concerns into CMSs. With it, Content Management Systems can focus better on their core functionalities, and get the missing pieces through code-sharing and collaboration.

For me, the decoupled CMS story began in the OSCOM era of early 2000s, and culminated in the still-popular Decoupling Content Management article I wrote in 2011. The tools mentioned there — Create.js, VIE, and PHPCR — have since reached quite a nice level of adoption in mainstream CMSs.